Abstract

This thesis examines communist and post-communist press texts, as they are represented in the Russian newspaper Izvestiia. Taking a before-and-after approach, two case studies are performed, as well as compared and contrasted. The first examines articles documenting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Using the same newspaper title, the second investigates news coverage of the crisis over Ukraine in 2014. The study employs a Cold War framework to examine and correlate questions about the role and place of journalism then and now, by exploring both similarities and differences, from an explicitly linguistic angle. Applying a framing approach as a type of Critical Discourse Analysis, not only as a method of research, but also as a broader theoretical framework, the thesis aims to articulate a deeper understanding of the operational realities of Russian journalism and its troubled transition from Soviet to post-Soviet times, as well as to uncover its professional techniques in building imaginaries about Soviet and post-Soviet Russia and Russianness then and now.